EVERY sitting parliamentary day (with the exception of Friday) begins with an hour of question time, with each department of state answering questions once a month. Last Tuesday it was the turn of the Deputy Prime Minister.

It was also his birthday and he had let it be known that he relished answering questions on his birthday, indeed he said that there is nothing he liked more.

It is surprising therefore, that he forbore from answering any until we were on question five.

Instead, he allowed his Conservative minister of state, Greg Clark, to answer the big political question of reform of the House of Lords – which until so very recently was Mr Clegg’s own pet project.

When the Lords’ reform bill he introduced in July 2012 failed, he was so angry he responded by scuppering the reduction in the number of MPs and the re-drawing of all constituency boundaries so that each parliamentary division had the same number of voters (which had been a key Conservative requirement from the coalition agreement and one for which the Liberal Democrats had already received their quid pro quo in the form of a referendum on reform of the voting system).

His silence on Tuesday therefore, was – to say the least – very strange. The Labour shadow minister demanded to know what the Government was doing to secure reform of the House of Lords and rehearsed a litany of all that is wrong: That it is getting ever larger and older – with no means of retiring those peers who are simply “past it”; that there is no means of expelling crooks and jailbirds – of which there are quite a few still sitting and making our laws.

Greg Clark responded by saying that he could understand the rebels, who disagreed with the reforms and so voted against them, but what he never had understood was Labour, who claimed to support the reforms but nevertheless voted against them. The unreformed House lives on.

I recall there never being much enthusiasm for taking the huge amount of parliamentary time and effort to reform it.

I was a supporter of reform but I remember colleagues continually demanding of me: “How many constituents have ever written to you about it?” and, to be honest, the answer is probably half a dozen over ten years.

I suppose it is true that, while we would never have designed a House of Lords as it now is, so long as it works tolerably well, why bother trying to fix what isn’t broken.

What people are writing to me about all the time, however, is their demand for a referendum on the EU. They want one because nobody under the age of 57 has had a say on it, and they want one because they were promised one – a promise which has remained unfulfilled.

Now we are seeking to put this right by promising a renegotiation of the terms of our EU membership followed by a referendum in 2017.

To show good faith, and because of the history of broken promises, we want to put 2017 referendum requirements into law now. We have passed a bill in the Commons and it had its first day in the Lords last Friday. It is clear that a substantial number of peers are out to wreck this bill. If they were to do so, it is proof that the Lords is broken and does need fixing.

If, in our democracy, this unelected body were to deny people a vote on an issue to which we attach such importance, it would be an outrage. It would cry out for that unelected and anachronistic body to be swept into the dustbin of history.